


Compromise

by doodle



Series: (My Heart) In Your Hands [1]
Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Angst, Established Relationship, M/M, No Spoilers, Relationship(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-29
Updated: 2011-12-29
Packaged: 2017-10-28 11:03:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,085
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/307201
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/doodle/pseuds/doodle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When John finds a photograph signed <i>My dear Sherlock, I remain very truly yours. Irene x</i> framed beside Sherlock's bed, it damages their relationship in a way he hadn't thought possible.</p><p>(This was written before <i>any</i> information was released about Scandal in Belgravia, or Irene's character. There are <i>no</i> spoilers in this story for anything at all, and the story has not been edited since before the Scandal in Belgravia screening.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Compromise

**Author's Note:**

> This started off as an idle thought about ACD Canon Holmes' relationship with Irene as an intellectual pursuit only, and somehow ended up turning in to a BBC Sherlock story. It then turned into a very angsty Sherlock story, focusing entirely on John. _Then_ someone asked me about Sherlock in this situation and it all got a bit more interesting, and the second part of this story happened. I decided I should probably post it before the new series starts and the whole Sherlock landscape changes dramatically.
> 
> Both pieces are intended to be read together, and in the order of posting.

She’s beautiful.

Possibly the most beautiful woman John has ever seen.

Her face is tilting upward, her soft jaw and sharp cheekbones glow in the light from above but her brown eyes sparkle in invitation from under heavy lids. She's reclining on a pure white fur rug, leaning back on her hands with her knees curled under her just a little.

She looks like she's right out of 1950's Hollywood. All classy seduction.

Her dress is deep red, decadent against her smooth, pale skin. It's provocative even though John sees more skin on display during a trip to Tesco. Provocative _because_ John sees more skin in Tesco. The silk is perfectly cut, ghosting over her slender curves. It hints at so much more.

The photograph is sexy in everything it doesn't show rather than in what it does.

It feels like a blow to the solar plexus. Everything about the woman, the photograph, screams intimacy and it has the place of honour in Sherlock's bedroom.

It’s framed beside his _bed_.

It's not something John can ignore, can pretend he hasn't seen. The photo isn't the sort to be easily dismissed, the kind that normal men keep around, collected from page 3 of The Sun or Nuts. It's not all tits and sexy knickers and fantasy.

It's the sort of picture you send someone who knows what's underneath the clothes. The kind that makes promises rather than teases.

John has to will his hands not to tremble as he picks up the photograph. The frame is solid, expensive and well cared for. It looks like one of the only things in the room that’s been dusted since Sherlock started spending most of the nights he actually sleeps in John’s bed rather than his own. 

It’s just as damning up close as it was from ten feet away. Only, along the bottom of the mount the photo is set in John can make out something… something that looks like writing.

He pulls the photograph from the frame and this time he can’t stop his hands from shaking as he turns it over. He finds lilting feminine handwriting running across the bottom of the picture, declaring:

 _My dear Sherlock, I remain very truly yours. Irene x_

It feels as though someone is sat on John’s chest.

He can barely breathe.

Six months of living with Sherlock. Three months of being _with_ Sherlock, of thinking they were building something that mattered between them after Moriarty and now this.

When they started their relationship Sherlock told him there wasn’t anyone else, there hadn’t ever been anyone and John had believed him. Had never imagined that Sherlock would have a woman’s photo by the bed he still called his own. That there was a woman out there, somewhere, who signed herself _very truly yours_ on a photo full of promises to the man he loves. 

“John!” Sherlock calls from the living room. It startles John so hard he drops the frame, but fortunately it lands on the bed. He leaves it there.

“John!” Sherlock calls again when he doesn’t answer. “Have you found it yet? Time’s running out, and I would avoid looking under the bed, if I were you. There may or may not be a full cup of tea that’s been there since we moved in. It might very well have colonised my old socks by now.”

 _Oh_. John is supposed to be looking for something, isn’t he? They’d been laughing in the kitchen and John had teased Sherlock that he just wasn’t looking hard enough. He’d bet him the washing and drying up that he could find it in less than fifteen minutes.

Now all he can see, all he can think about is the photo. _Irene_.

“You didn’t find it,” Sherlock accurately deduces without even looking as John returns to the living room, probably from his footsteps.

John stops at the end of the sofa, where Sherlock is sprawled as usual, and taking up all the available space. Normally John finds it endearing, often curls up next to him if Sherlock is in the sort of mood that allows for a bit of a cuddle.

Cuddling is the last thing on John’s mind.

Something in his breathing, or the line of his shadow reflecting in the window must tell Sherlock that John has lost all sense of joviality. Barely a second or two passes before Sherlock is sitting up, asking as he turns to face John, “What’s wrong?”

“I found this,” John says. He holds the photo out and bridging the distance between himself and Sherlock with a steady hand takes a sheer force of will. One John didn’t even know he was capable of as Sherlock frowns down at the picture.

John stretches his arm out further, pushing the photograph more into Sherlock’s space in silent command.

“John?” Sherlock questions tentatively, looking even more perplexed as his gaze flickers between John and the photo. As though _Irene_ hadn’t been sitting beside his bed for who knew how long. “What-?”

“Do you know _where_ I found it?” John demands and Sherlock finally takes the photo from him. John’s knuckles are white and the edges of the photo are crumpled from how tightly he’s been holding it.

Sherlock’s frown deepens. “In a frame. Beside my bed.”

John crosses his arms over chest and his back straightens. “Do you not see how that _might_ be a problem for me?”

“I-,” Sherlock starts but John doesn’t let him finish.

“No, I don’t want to hear it.”

He doesn’t want to hear Sherlock say _no_. Doesn’t want him to completely ruin the delusion John has been harbouring about them, about Sherlock. That he actually understood what was happening between him and John, that they were both on the same page about what it meant.

“Who is _very truly yours, Irene_?”

Sherlock puts the photo on the sofa next to him. Face down. Handling it in much the same way John used to watch men with IEDs and Sherlock’s got it all wrong. If anything is going to explode, it won’t be the photograph. It’ll be John.

“No one important.”

“Don’t,” John says, voice level though he feels nothing like calm inside. “Don’t even _try_ it.”

Sherlock’s got another thing coming if he thinks he can pull that one over on John. That John will accept a glorified _she’s nobody_. Not from Sherlock, not after everything.

Sherlock swallows.

“Now.”

Sherlock’s eyes widen for moment, the shock so brief it’s gone in an instant, but John doesn’t miss it. Sherlock isn’t used to being on the end of orders from John.

Sherlock’s eyes travel between John and the sofa, a silent plea rather than invitation. John ignores it.

“A foreign… politician of a rather a great amount of importance came to employ my services around three years ago on the recommendation of my brother. I was skint and he was willing to pay. A lot. He was married and stupid, and I’m sure you can see where this is going. He’d had an affair with an American woman by the name of Irene Adler and when it ended, she retained the sex tape he’d stupidly made. I was paid to retrieve it and all copies so they could be destroyed, as any word of the affair or the tape would have damaged the campaign he was very close to winning.”

“And?” John prompts, for once not interested in the least in Sherlock’s deductive brilliance or grandstanding.

“She won,” Sherlock says, breaking eye contact with John for the first time. He seems almost smaller, ashamed as he confesses. “She got the better of me and she still has the tape, though she has not released it. I don’t believe she ever will.”

John is surprised, but not impressed. Sherlock had seemed so shocked to find that Moriarty was _better_ than him at their game. He never would have believed Sherlock had been bested before, not with his unflappable confidence and _ego_.

The shame with which he admits Irene’s victory over the great Sherlock Holmes doesn’t endear him to John. It might have done if Sherlock had shown any sort of contrition over having her photo beside his bed. If he actually understood that her picture cut a deeper wound in their relationship than Sherlock being wrong ever could.

“And where exactly does _you_ having _that_ come into this?” John nods at the picture still face down on the sofa and does nothing to hide his disdain.

“It was waiting for me, in a hand delivered envelope where I was living at the time. Along with a note gloating over her intellectual superiority.”

John blinks. “And your first thought was, _I know, I’ll frame it and keep it by my bed_? Even now while I’m upstairs sleeping with my flatmate half the nights of a week?”

“You’re jealous?” Sherlock says, his voice questioning. There’s a crease between his eyebrows and his lip are pursed, ever so slightly.

“No,” John snaps. Sherlock’s right eyebrow starts to rise. So does John’s blood pressure. “I am _not_ ruddy well jealous, Sherlock. Try again, nearer the start of the alphabet.”

It doesn’t take long for Sherlock to catch up, or to start looking as though he can’t decide whether to be outraged or amused. “John, you are being completely irrational.”

He bites his tongue. “Oh, _really_?”

“Yes! In fact, completely irrational does not even begin to cover it.”

John rubs his hand over his face and asks _someone_ for strength. The strength to not punch Sherlock in the face. Or better yet, shoot him. “Then do you want to tell me why you have a picture of her by your bed? Because in _normal_ committed same-sex relationships the only women you have pictures of beside your bed are sisters, mothers, nieces or occasionally aunties.”

Sherlock says nothing.

 _Normal_ has hit the mark. Hard.

Sherlock’s face slams closed like a vaults and John can’t tell anything he’s thinking. It’s the look Sherlock gets when Donovan cuts too close to the bone and her words have wounded him, though nothing on earth could make him admit it.

It’s a look he’s not supposed to give John. Not anymore.

John grinds his teeth and clenches his fists where they’re wedged in the crook of his arms. He tries to contain the pressure building inside his chest. His fuse is on a hair-trigger as Sherlock shuts him out for the first time since they began.

“Why?” he demands, and leaves no room for Sherlock to deflect.

“Are you angry because you didn’t know about the photograph, because it’s a woman or because the subject could be seen as sexually provocative?” Sherlock asks.

John hears something in back of his jaw crack at Sherlock’s level tone. He asks the question as if it’s academic, as if he doesn’t know the answer when he bloody well should.

John swallows, considers leaving and coming back when his temper’s cooled. Only, he’s not certain it’s going to. Not when Sherlock doesn’t have a fucking clue. 

“Try because I didn’t know about the sexually provocative picture of a woman you’ve been keeping by your bed,” John spells out, not even trying to contain the fact he’s practically shaking with fury.

If Sherlock doesn’t get it now, so help them both.

Then Sherlock is giving him that look. That one that screams how very wrong John is, how much he is failing to understand and it’s Sherlock who’s wrong. He’s never been so bloody wrong before as he is about this.

Forget leaving, John is going to kill him if anything like the word _wrong_ so much as leaves his mouth.

“John, I was telling you the truth when I said women weren’t my area. Her appearance is little more than window dressing. It didn’t interest me at the time and it _never_ will. There was nothing physical about our relationship,” Sherlock assures him. 

There’s a note of sincerity in Sherlock’s words, but it doesn’t come from honesty. Sherlock talks about himself the way he makes deductions on cases, the way he talks about facts. It’s not the way he lies, and John knows full well how Sherlock does that.

It’s not that John doesn’t believe Sherlock, he does. It just doesn’t explain why Sherlock would keep a picture like that. John can’t understand how it could be for any other reason than because he has fond memories.

Sherlock reads John’s lingering question in the silence, the same way he reads everything and meets John’s eyes again to explain in softer tones. “I keep the photo because she was extraordinary, but not in the way you seem to think. My relationship with Irene was a battle of wits, intellectual cat and mouse. Nothing more, nothing less. She won and I revere her for it. The photo is to remind myself of that. ”

The whole world shifts under John’s feet.

 _She won and I revere her for it._

With those words it’s gone. In one long, spine shaking rush all the anger and tension and everything that was wound up so tightly inside John that he was ready to explode, vanishes. Realisation hits him and leaves him feeling hollow, the truth rattling around in the empty shell of his anger and he wants it back. Wants Sherlock to have slept with Irene, to keep her picture to remember the curve of her hips and the smell of her hair. Anything but this, anything but her brain.

“You are the only person I have an emotional and physical relationship with, the _only_ person I’m interested in having one with,” Sherlock promises when John doesn’t speak. When he can’t speak for the sensation of his chest being cracked open like one of Sherlock’s corpses with the force of what he’s feeling.

In any other relationship it would be enough to have Sherlock physically and emotionally, but it’s not. They’re not in any other relationship and Sherlock isn’t any other man. It’s why John loves him so much it might destroy them both.

To Sherlock the physical is all just transport. It’s not that Sherlock doesn’t enjoy himself, or not get off when they have sex. John would never go to bed with him if he didn’t, but Sherlock simply isn’t driven by any need to have sex, ever. He can be, and is, aroused by John but he doesn’t wake up in the morning horny and unable to think straight until he’s shagged John senseless. He probably wouldn’t miss it if they never had sex again.

“John, you’ve not said anything in five minutes. Please, I don’t know what else to say,” Sherlock pleads, his hands curling around John’s where they’re resting in his lap.

John doesn’t remember sitting down on the sofa and Sherlock’s hands are warm against his own, soft except for the violin calluses on his fingertips. John imagines it’s supposed to be reassuring, physical contact to reinforce Sherlock’s words.

It doesn’t work.

“I’m sorry,” John says. Finding his voice, even though he feels lost for words. There are too many thoughts whirring inside his head to the pounding tune of _no, please no_ and _why did you look, why did you **ask?**_

“Yes, of course. I’m sorry,” Sherlock says and squeezes John’s hands in his own. “I didn’t think the photograph would make you so unhappy.”

From anyone else it would be enough. John would nod, maybe they’d have a bit of a kiss and a cuddle and life would go on.

But this isn’t anyone else. This is Sherlock. And it feels as though the world is crumbling down around John’s ears and Sherlock still doesn’t have a clue. For once he’s a mile behind, back where John was angry and jealous because of a sexy picture.

John doesn’t know how he’s still breathing.

 _Intellect._

Sherlock puts the highest value on intellect. John’s always accepted that in this area he’s deficient in comparison to Sherlock, but until this very moment he’s always been okay with that. As far as he’s concerned only two people have been smart enough to interest Sherlock intellectually, one is his brother and one has been blown to pieces.

Now there’s Irene.

It feels a bit like being shot. Only at least when he was shot there was morphine to dull the pain. There is nothing for this. For knowing that the most important part of the man you love belongs to someone else. Will _always_ belong to someone else.

“John?” Sherlock asks, cautiously. His fingers loosen.  

John swallows.

He turns his hands beneath Sherlock’s, links their fingers together. John has a choice. He accepts that while Sherlock loves him, he will never have all of Sherlock and he’ll always know. Or he leaves, and finds someone normal, who he can love and can have all of, who’ll love all of him back.

“No, I meant _I’m_ sorry,” he says softly. He smiles at Sherlock.

“You are?” Sherlock asks, eyes widening.

“For thinking that- I don’t even know what I was thinking,” John lies easily. “I’m sorry for getting so angry. I saw red for a bit there and now I feel a bit of a prat.”

There was never a choice.

It’s _Sherlock_.

It will always be Sherlock.

Sherlock, who looks both confused and relieved. John leans in and kisses him soft and chaste on the lips. “Think I’ll have an early night.”

“Are you sure you’re alright?” Sherlock asks, catching John’s wrist loosely in the circle of his fingers as John stands.

“Nothing a bit of sleep won’t fix,” John lies again. False assurances trip from his tongue effortlessly as he leans in to kiss the crown of Sherlock’s head. Climbs the stairs wearily, as though he’s walking away from the end of a war.

John has as much of Sherlock’s love as Sherlock’s able to give. Nothing will change that. Nothing will stop John from knowing what today has shown him. He doesn’t have it all. He never will but it has to be enough. Even if he wants more, wants it all, someone else will always have that piece of Sherlock that he’s unable to claim. The most important part.

Even if it’s going to eat him away inside, he can’t walk away. John would rather have pieces of Sherlock for all of time, than let him go. He can’t imagine his life without Sherlock in it. Doesn’t want to.

He’ll live with what he has. What he can.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> For non-Brits:
> 
> \- Nuts is a lads mag (if you really feel the need to know more about it, google Nuts Magazine but note it is NSFW)  
> \- The Sun page 3 = a girl with her tits out.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [All of Me](https://archiveofourown.org/works/447053) by [Krekta](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Krekta/pseuds/Krekta)




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